Brendan Ryan (Labour)

I thank Members for what was a reasonably serious debate. What prompted me to raise this issue, and I did so on the Order of Business, was a report, which I have not heard contradicted, that the Revenue had concluded that there was no evidence that any bank encouraged people to set up bogus offshore accounts of which there were 145,000 in their heyday. I am supposed to believe there is no evidence that people did other than go into banks and open bogus accounts, on their own initiative, without any assistance, advice or encouragement from the very banks which were advertising ostensibly the benefits of a non-resident having an account in Ireland. I do not believe that is true. I am not saying the Revenue is doing anything improper; I am saying that in the way it does its business it concluded it could not find evidence. I do not believe that is the case.

I do not think most citizens believe one could have 140,000 non-resident accounts and not have the banking system, to some extent, involved in encouraging it. One starts from that position about the Revenue Commissioners that they have come to that conclusion. I shall quote a little of what the Minister of State said, but Senator O'Toole has been disingenuous because I do not want this to be an attack on good public servants. It is an assessment of the capacity of one group of public servants to do a particular job and a judgment call about whether it could be done better by other people. If Members of the Oireachtas are not able to do that about the public service generally, we might as well forget about our job altogether. That is all it is about. There are no attacks on people. In his contribution the Minister of State referred to the "approach which was adopted in 1996-7, when Revenue initially took on the function of investigating cases with a view to prosecution and ... a number of officers in the investigation branch received training..." He stated further:

Since 1996, 28 individuals and companies have been convicted of a variety of serious tax offences, six of these in the past 12 months. In 11 of these cases, jail sentences were imposed... Currently, there are 42 cases of serious tax evasion under investigation with a view to prosecution...

That is in this period when they began to do it.